What has been your strength?
Vulnerability, which I turned into my enemy until I was 30; he escaped from it with persistent suicidal ideation.
Psychiatric hospitalization?
Yes, and addiction to drugs and alcohol until I learned acceptance by cultivating another type of relationship with my vulnerability that today has become my strength.
Tell me.
We believe that most of our problems come from vulnerability when in reality they come from trying to escape from it.
Should we accept that things can go wrong?
If you live enough birthdays the reality is that things will go wrong sooner or later, you have to accept it like the force of gravity, and most people don't. Trying to avoid suffering or anxiety causes us more suffering.
Because?
The lives of people who try to combat anxiety become much smaller in the long term. Your life shrinks. Anxiety is fear of losing something you have. The more people and things you love, the more exposed you are to loss, and the way to reduce that vulnerability is to reduce those connections.
It doesn't seem like a good idea.
It is not. At a deep level, anxiety triggers when we cannot maintain connection with our essential environment. We worry that we are not good, strong, virtuous, and loving enough for others.
We are social beings.
Harry Harlow did a lot of experiments on attachment and said that a monkey is just a dead monkey, and for millions of years that is the truth that we have evolved on at an evolutionary level.
If anxiety is the price of living, is it about accepting it?
It's about openness, about being involved with your own life. At some point everyone's heart breaks and the common reaction is to isolate yourself, to avoid it happening again. What would it mean to do the opposite, open your heart?
Your acceptance and openness therapy?
If you run away from relationships because they have harmed you, it will be unlikely that anyone will harm you; but the absence of a relationship will hurt you.
What do you propose to make anxiety our friend?
Ask yourself this question: in a world where anxiety was not imprisoning me, in what way and where would my life expand: would I paint, dance, who would I like to connect with, or what projects would I do?
And isn't that frustrating?
Find other people who are doing those things that you would do and interact with them on a regular basis even if it is minimally, everything has to do with direction, start very small but persistently.
Give me more ideas to approach anxiety appropriately.
We tell ourselves stories about ourselves throughout our lives: “At parties I'm the dull one” or “I'm not an intelligent person.” In certain situations that story will be triggered and you will suffer anxiety, the idea is to carry those stories with kindness.
How do you embrace feeling unintelligent?
Imagine that your child is afraid of showing himself to the group. Are you going to hide him in a cave or are you going to help him approach that situation with love and without forcing? How easy it is to imagine that with a child and how difficult it is to imagine it with ourselves.
Self love.
The misalignment between the direction of our life and what we really want causes us anxiety and discomfort. This is where identifying the values that are important to each of you comes into play.
Give me more ideas to cope with anxiety.
Notice how you ask your question, as if you have to first resolve anxiety and then live, and life doesn't work like that. Anxiety or depression emerge from our personal history. There are people more vulnerable than others, I, for example, am tremendously vulnerable because I have buried three of my brothers at 36, 45 and 53 years old.
Wow, how hard.
They all died for rejecting suffering. There are no tricks to avoid suffering, in the face of suffering the choice is to experience life.
And what experience does it offer us?
The question is where do you hide to feel safe, I used drugs and alcohol and looked for a community that could help me.
I understand, he came out of hiding.
When you do yoga, as you move you find the place where there is resistance, a lack of flexibility... Your psychology is the same, for some it is intimate relationships, work. Where you find that lack of flexibility is where your practice is.
